Chapter 4
Chapter Four
TOM
This dog has opinions about the sofa.
Primarily, that it owns it. We’ve had three conversations about this today, which I’ve lost. It’s currently watching me from atop the cushion it claimed as its throne, one ear up, one ear down, knowing that it’s won and I don’t have it in me to try again.
Its brown eyes are fixed on me, declaring victory.
‘You’re not even supposed to be here,’ I tell it, turning my lip up. ‘You’re a temporary guest. Guests don’t colonise the furniture.’
Both ears stand to attention.
The flat is quiet – no footsteps on the stairs, no muffled sounds from the waiting room below, no phones ringing at reception.
Dad’s practice. Even though he’s retiring, handing over, it’s still his.
The building, the clients, the flat upstairs that he offered when I finished my training.
Easier than commuting. And someone should be on site for emergencies.
I’d moved in for a year, maybe two. That was five years ago.
Two bedrooms I don’t need, a kitchen that opens onto the living room, windows that catch the morning light.
I’ve made it mine in the ways that matter – bookshelves overflowing onto the floor, a stack of veterinary journals by the armchair that I’ve been meaning to file for three years.
The walls are the same white Dad painted them.
I keep meaning to change that too. I keep meaning to do a lot of things.
The evening light is cool-toned May – pale and slow, catching dust motes. Through the glass I can see the harbour, the boats shifting gently on the water, and beyond them the roof of the Lavender Café.
I look away. The dog watches me do it.
‘Stop that,’ I tell it.
It puts its head on its paws. The gaze says it plainly: Pathetic.
I should eat something. There’s leftover pasta in the fridge from Mum’s latest delivery – she still brings food up every few days, as though I might forget to feed myself without supervision.
I should heat it up, eat at the table like a functioning adult, maybe read something that isn’t about canine dermatology.
I call Nina.
She picks up on the second ring. I don’t think about that.
‘Is someone dead?’
‘What?’
‘You’re calling. On the phone. Like an actual phone call. I assumed catastrophe.’
‘I call you all the time.’
‘You text me all the time. You call me when something’s happened. Remember when Dot’s roof collapsed? You called.’
‘Dot’s roof was a genuine emergency.’
‘You called me when the Harbourmaster’s cat got stuck in the lifeboat winch.’ I breathe so deep at the sound of her voice that my breath echoes around the walls. One dog ear goes up. Judging.
‘That was also—’ I stop. ‘That was a complicated extraction. I needed moral support.’
‘You needed someone to laugh at you. Which I did. Extensively.’ I can hear her moving on the other end, a cupboard shutting, a mug being set down on a counter. She’s never still when she talks. Never has been. ‘So what’s the emergency that Tom Darcy has called and not texted about a Scotch egg?’
‘Another genuine emergency.’ My grin is miles wide. ‘I found a dog.’
Silence. Then, lower, breathless maybe, although that could be my wild imagination. ‘You found a dog.’
‘On the coast path, yesterday, while I was driving back from the Treloars’ farm. It was stuck in the gorse.’
‘Stuck how? And why didn’t Meg and Hayley mention this earlier when they were here?’
A twist in my stomach. ‘Meg and Hayley dropped by?’ Light, neutral. Definitely not pathetic.
‘Yes, and ate all the scones, but did not mention a stuck dog, which I’m pretty sure should have been top of the agenda.’
Did they tell you how pathetic I’ve been without you?
Did they tell you I made an excuse not to come?
‘Properly stuck,’ I say. ‘Wedged in and panicking. It was the most pathetic sight I’ve seen, and you know how I am with pathetic.
I can’t survive it.’ I look at the dog. The dog looks back at me, and there’s a definite flicker of embarrassment.
‘It’s a terrier cross, I think. No chip, no collar, no one’s claimed it yet.
I mean, I haven’t been far, but there are no posters up looking for a missing dog.
It’s sprained its leg, but it’s healing. Couple of weeks and it’ll be fine.’
‘And it’s with you now? You’ve taken it upstairs into the flat?’ There’s a rustle as she finally sits, and I can visualise her tucking her legs up, mug of steaming tea balanced on the arm of the sofa.
‘It’s on my sofa now. Looking at me like I’m the one who’s trespassing.’
She laughs. I close my eyes, just for a second. Just the reflex of a muscle I’ve stopped trying to train out.
‘Describe it to me,’ she says, her voice a spark of life I haven’t heard in weeks. Since before she left. Since before a lot of things.
‘Small. Five kilos, might be six once it’s been fed properly. Brown and white, with a wiry coat, one ear that stands up and one that flops down. It’s got these eyebrows—’
‘Dogs don’t have eyebrows.’
‘This one does. They’re very expressive and right now they’re communicating profound judgement about my life choices.
’ I settle back into the armchair, phone pressed to my ear.
The leather is cracked and soft, older than I am – another thing of Dad’s.
‘It also has a beard. A small, dignified beard. Like a nineteenth-century philosopher who’s fallen on hard times. ’
‘I need a photo immediately.’
‘I’ll send one after.’
‘Send one now.’
‘I’m on the phone to you now. I can’t do both.’
‘You absolutely can. You’re just being difficult.’
‘I’m holding the phone to my ear like a civilised person. If you wanted photo service, you should have texted.’
‘Send. The. Photo.’
‘After.’
She gives a tsk that turns half laugh, and I hold the phone a fraction closer.
‘So it was just … stuck in the gorse? How does a dog get stuck in gorse?’
‘Chasing something, probably. Rabbit, maybe. There are more warrens up near the Treloars than I care to think of. My theory is it went in confident and discovered halfway through that gorse is not as forgiving as it looks.’
‘Your theory.’
‘I’ve had a lot of time to develop theories while it’s watched me from my spot on the sofa.’
Nina laughs again, a belly rumble, and I let it run through me and fill the flat until it’s lighting the corners. The evening light has shifted while we’ve been talking, the cool pale turning honeyed.
‘So what are you going to do with it?’ she asks.
‘Keep putting up notices. Check the lost-dog pages. Wait for someone to claim it.’
‘And if no one does?’
‘Then I suppose I have a dog.’
‘Tom Darcy with a dog.’ She sounds it out. ‘That actually makes a lot of sense. You’d be good at having a dog.’
‘Would I?’
‘You’re very dependable. Dogs like dependable. They like routine and knowing where they stand and someone who’ll show up every day without making a fuss about it. That’s basically your whole personality.’
I press my thumb into the cracked leather of the armchair.
‘Speaking of,’ I say, ‘how’s your mum?’
‘Driving me slowly insane, but in a loving way.’ The jangle of her bangles – that sound I’d know in a crowd of thousands, in the dark, underwater. ‘She’s convinced I’m not eating properly, which is objectively hilarious given that I run a café and have lived off scones since I got here.’
‘Ran.’
The word is out before I catch it. There’s a beat. Silence.
‘Run,’ she says. Quiet. Firm. ‘Present tense.’
‘Present tense. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. Just don’t bury me while I’m still trying to breathe.’
I want to apologise. Grovel. But I hear the cupboard open again.
Nina in motion, Nina filling the silence with activity because stillness is the thing she can’t afford.
‘I’m eating constantly. Her fridge is a war zone.
She keeps buying things and I keep cooking them and then she tells me I look tired and buys more things. ’ A pause. ‘I’m fine, Tom.’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’ I know she’s not. But I don’t push it because, over the years, I’ve learned where the edges are. I’ve spent a long time mapping them.
‘Isla called me,’ she says, pivoting us onto safer ground. ‘She’s reached the “I will be pregnant forever, this is my life now” stage of proceedings.’
‘Already? She’s not due for another few months. How’s she going to be by then?’
‘Apparently the cute little kicking bubbles she was feeling are no longer all that cute and Kit likes to play a game called “wake the baby up”.’
‘Sounds like Kit.’
‘She wanted to know if I had any café recommendations in Truro. Somewhere she could go and sit for three hours without anyone judging her for eating an entire cake.’
‘And do you?’
‘Of course; I said to come to Mum’s. I said she’d even let her have whipped cream on top of the frosting.’ She laughs, but it’s softer now. ‘She said they’re going to call the baby Peter if it’s a boy. I don’t know why she told me that. I mean, I do know why. I just wasn’t expecting—’
She doesn’t say another word, and in the strangled quiet I can hear her daily fight with her grief.
The silence sits between us. Below me, the refrigeration unit hums. Through the window, a gull cries out over the harbour.
‘That’s lovely,’ I say, because it’s true, and because anything else would be the wrong shape for the space she’s in.
‘It is. It really is.’ Her voice is fragile, held together with both hands.
‘I just didn’t expect it to hit me like that.
I was standing in Mum’s kitchen and she told me and I had to pretend I was fine about it, which I was, I am, but also I suddenly couldn’t breathe?
Which is ridiculous. It’s a good thing. It’s a beautiful thing. ’
‘It can be both.’
‘I know. I know it can.’ She exhales, long and unsteady. ‘I miss it. All of it, really. The bump updates and Brynn complaining about tourists and you sending me photos of questionable veterinary situations.’
‘The photos aren’t questionable. They’re educational.’
‘Tom, last week you sent me a close-up of an infected sheep’s hoof.’
‘That was a classic presentation of footrot. Very textbook.’